Associated Press
PITTSBURGH (AP) - Federal monitoring has improved the city’s police department and protected minorities from abuse, but many officers dislike the oversight and many blacks remain suspicious of police, according to a study requested by the Justice Department.
The Pittsburgh Bureau of Police and the Justice Department agreed to the oversight and several changes after dozens of residents alleged civil rights abuses by officers.
The consent decree has led to “many positive changes in Pittsburgh policing,” according to the preliminary report by the New York-based Vera Institute of Justice, which was hired by the Justice Department to study the changes.
The department reached the agreement to avoid a possible federal takeover. It introduced a computerized system to track officers’ behavior; required officers to document traffic stops and the race of the people pulled over; and required annual training in cultural diversity, integrity and ethics.
The report found that disciplinary reports against officers have dropped since 1997, citizen complaints against police have remained steady, and that an early warning system to spot problem officers seems to be working.
It said, however, that more must be done to educate officers, many of whom are skeptical about the reforms, and that it was “clear that African-Americans were consistently less optimistic about policing under the consent decree than whites.”
“The fact that negative perceptions of the police ... persist in a significant segment of the community makes it that much harder for the bureau to fulfill its mission,” the report says.
The report also highlighted a problem cited by civil rights activists and a court-appointed auditor - a backlog at the city’s Office of Municipal Investigations, which handles citizen complaints against police. The office had a backlog of 194 cases as of two weeks ago.
The report, which is being circulated among city and police officials, the Justice Department and civil rights activists, does not make any recommendation on whether the city should be released from the agreement. It also offers no suggestions on whether changes should be made in other troubled departments.
“We’re not trying to tell anybody what to do,” Robert C. Harris, the report’s lead researcher, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
The agreement stemmed from a 1996 class-action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union that accused the city, its highest officials and dozens of officers of condoning a pervasive pattern of abuse.